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Spiking the Meme

I took my revenge after a hundred years, and I only regret that I acted in haste.-Pashtun Proverb

A few weeks ago CTLab’s esteemed Managing Editortagged me with the equivalent of a chain-letter. Now normally, this is the kind of thing I flush down the toilet with extreme prejudice, and walk briskly away, whistling a merry tune as I go. In this case, I thought it better to lie in wait, lull my tormentor into a complacent stupor, and then pounce. And so it goes.

The rules are simple:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog. 2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. 3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. 4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. 5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Because we’re a creative and irreverent lot, recipients sometimes add new rules, like here, or duck full compliance, like here. So I do both, adding rules 6 and 7, thereby completing the meme and killing it dead in one fell swoop.

6. Introduce a martial proverb.7. Create a feedback loop and spike the meme.

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Rule 1 – CheckRule 2:

1. I served four years in 1st Bn Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. With a name like that, you HAVE to be hard. I spent another few years in the Canadian Army doing something else.

2. I’ve followed a non-traditional educational and professional trajectory, yet despite all that somehow ended up doing exactly what I always figured I’d be doing, through a series of unlikely but fortunate circumstances that could have been neither predicted nor planned for. Go figure. Call me a queue-jumper.

3. I rescued my three year old dog Rufus, who looks like a golden retriever but is really a street mongrel, from the blown out shell of a house in a frontline suburb of Sarejevo. He was eight weeks old at the time.

5. I once stood smack in the middle of a very large, partially excavated, secondary mass grave site. The stink of decay was heavy and cloying. All women and children. And that’s what makes me a true believer.

6. I like it when it rains. I especially like running in the rain. I also like running in -25, with at least several inches of snow on the ground. I’m Canadian, what did you expect?

7. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration…